>>>But I really get tired of listening to Visual FoxPro 'developers' with limited skill sets talk about 'rolling my own' regarding a framework when they don't even understand the issues involved, let alone how to solve them.
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>Well, they must have understood something, because they go the app going and at least someone was satisfied that it did the job, or it never would have been installed and paid for.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. There was a time when amateur developers could make money off of clients who knew even less than they did and whose expectations were very low and whose business needs were relatively simple. Often they were just glad to find a 'computer guy' who would work cheap. So what?

I'm saying the problem is not amateurs writing apps. It is an amateur who doesn't know he's an amateur and even worse who foists off substandard work on clients because he's too lazy to expand his knowledge and too cheap to get tools or training he obviously needs.

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>"limited skill sets" allow my grandson to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on the same instrument that Chopin used to compose and play his etudes and nocturnes, and it sounds pretty good to me, because it meets my needs and expectations at that moment.

Fine. I cheer kids playing T-Ball for just a good effort and yell at TV when a quarterback with more athletic ability than I'll ever have throws a pick. I'd be lucky to throw it that far, let alone to the right guy ... but I'm not a pro-football player. Whole different set of expectations and payscale.

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>When I want to listen to Chopin, I know where to find him.

Exactly, and hopefully it won't be some clown who sincerely thinks he knows what he's doing because he is really that ignorant. As Tamar said, you can make a pretty good living trailing after guys like that, cleaning up the messes they've made. When I come in and find an app that crashes in multiuser situations, routinely trashes DBC/DBFs on a network, works against SQL Server but has no conception of shared connections, hard codes stuff that should be data-driven, has tables that are poorly designed and key on actual data fields ...

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>I once picked up a VFP6 app written by a deceased programmer who really only knew SQL and what he got VFP to do using basically only SQL was downright amazing. It had been running efficiently and effectively for decades.
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Depending on what an app is asked to do, and depending on whether the expectations ever change, of course it is possible some app written by a novice 15 years ago is still running. Heck, some of *my* early efforts are still running. But part of the evolution process has been learning to know what I don't know and to do what is necessary to fill those gaps and to get help when I need it - hence a third party framework I could never write on my own.

>Maybe with his "limited skill sets" he didn't "understand the issues involved", but the client was happy as a clam and had one of the the most efficient and cost effective business applications I've ever seen.
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>I made my changes using his idiom and it's still ticking away daily.

If a client pays for an amateur app and is satisfied, fine. But if he's investing $50k and up for something he's running a chunk of his business on, he's entitled to a professionally written product and if I'm charging the kind of money I'm charging he's going to be very cranky if he doesn't get it.

Anecdotal evidence that apps developed by amateurs can make people happy doesn't really invalidate the point I was trying to make. My sister doesn't claim to be a programmer, but she can put something together very quickly and efficiently in FilemakerPro that is very very impressive and exactly fills the need for an in house app at her ad agency.

But her skills are not what you need to go out to write software for other people as a profession - and she knows it.

My clients also know that they are not just paying me to do all the stuff they've thought of, but to do that stuff they never thought about - and don't want to think about - but they need to trust that I will make sure they are handled.